No One Makes Fried Chicken Like This (Sweet & Spicy Edition)

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Back in my day, waffles were crispy, but nowadays, I can’t find a single crispy waffle to save my life. What I really want is to make crispy waffles and serve them with umami-rich Korean fried chicken on top. This dish represents the perfect balance of sweet and savory: Korean Fried Chicken and Waffles with shatteringly crispy waffles.

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Growing up, a waffle used to be crispy. That’s crispy. But for some reason, today I can’t find a crispy waffle to save my life. And of course, one of waffles classic pairings is fried chicken. But what I’m really interested in showing you today is how to make waffles crispy and then pairing them with like an umami packed Korean fried chicken. One of the ultimate expressions of sweet and savory. This is Korean fried chicken and waffles. Now, there’s a few tricks to make waffles both crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. One of them borrows from a pancake method, which is separating the eggs. We’re going to crack it over a wide bowl. Capture the egg whites. Just pass the yolk back and forth. Egg whites go in there. Yolk goes into a measuring cup. That’s where we’re going to add the liquid. So, I’m going to use the measuring cup to be able to measure out the liquids. Then, repeat it again. We’re going to set that off to the side. And immediately we’re going to whip these into a light fluffy foam that’s going to create that fluffy aireriness inside. Big whisk. Wide bowl. Cold eggs. And we’re just going to beat it like whipped cream. Like to start it down here like tilted. Go back and forth really fast. That’s going to quickly whip air and transform them into like a loose foam. Once you start getting it foamy, then we’re going to roll it around the bowl. Again, the bigger the bowl, the faster this will whip. Now, what we’re looking for is soft peaks. And even though that looks like a soft peak, right? That’s not it. We got to keep going. That’s not really it either. Keep going. And then once you get close, you can just start dialing it in. Few whips at a time. Pull it up. That’s nice soft. Now, we’re going to keep this cold in the refrigerator. Now, the other three liquid ingredients. Buttermilk, butter, which we have to throw in the microwave to melt, and vanilla. Four tablespoons of butter. Just going to slice it up so it melts a little quicker. So, we’re using two fats. Butter for flavor. A little bit of oil just to kind of help seal in that crisp. We’re going to need 1 and 3/4 cup of buttermilk. Whisk that egg in there. A little bit of vanilla extract. You can do like a cap. About 50 g of the oil. And melt our butter. 30 seconds. Swirl it about halfway through. Then there’s always just a few little bits left. We just swirl to finish melting it all. We don’t want it like broken or too hot. And then add the butter. Now that’s our wet ingredients. Let’s work on the dry ingredients. So we got our scale out. Set it to grams. We start with allpurpose flour. 240 g. Now here’s one of the secrets to get that sort of like shattery crisp exterior crunch that we’re looking for. Cornstarch about 25 g or it’s 2 cups of flour and 2 tbsp of cornstarch. two teaspoons of baking powder, half teaspoon of baking soda, and then 40 gram or 3 tablespoons granulated sugar. All right, so now we got our dry mix, a wet mix, and our whites. First thing we’re going to do, mix in the wet to the dry. Get everything out. And now here’s the secret. All we’re going to do is mix it as little as possible. I’m going to start to like literally not mix it. I’m just going to start to fold it. Turn the bowl, cut it in half, and fold it. Lumps are okay. Over mixing is not. See how it’s kind of lumpy? That’s good. Now, it’s mostly worked in. There’s still some dry bits throughout, but we still have some working to do. And that involves adding the whites to this mix in like three segments. Gently folding it in. Notice the technique. It’s not mixing. It’s sort of scraping the sides and folding over. Then we can add a little bit more. [Music] Once it’s just about incorporated, we can go ahead and add the rest. And even just kind of turning it, you can feel the air in the batter. This goes into the fridge until we’re ready to use it. Now, I know a lot of you probably pay rent. And I’d bet not one of you earn anything in return for it. But our sponsor today, Built, is changing that with a loyalty program for renters that transforms rent payments you pay every month, oftent times our biggest expense, into valuable rewards. When you pay rent through built, you earn built points and there’s no cost to join and you can start earning rewards on rent no matter where you live. These points then can be transferred to your favorite airlines and hotels or used towards future rent payments. You can use them for lift rides, student loan payments, much more. Built is also unlocking experiences and VIP treatments around your neighborhood like complimentary add-ons at Built partners and comedy and dining experiences. Built transforms the spending you’re already doing every month into an opportunity to earn rewards and unlock the best that your neighborhood has to offer. And for credibility, Built’s been ranked the highest value point currency by the points guy. So sign up in the link in my description or scan the QR code floating up on the screen right now. Make sure you use my URL so they know that I sent you. Now, let’s get into some chicken. Now, for me, when it comes to chicken and waffles, there better not be a bone in my chicken. So, here we have some chicken tenders that have been soaking in a delicious little bath that I prepared yesterday. To a large bowl, I add the chicken tenders and then added enough buttermilk to coat them. Then, I’m going to go in with like a generous amount of salt to make this almost like a buttermilk brine. And then I’m going to add a tablespoon of one of the core ingredients of Korean fried chicken gou along with some onion powder and some garlic powder. And we’re going to get those all tossed together and let that sit in the fridge overnight. And that takes us to now. Now, you can let this marinade as little as an hour. But the longer that chicken absorbs that marinade, the more tender and juicy it’s going to be. And now, when it comes to the dredging process, we’re going with more of like a southern fried. We’re not going to do that shatter crust of the Korean fried chicken, but we’re going to flavor it with the Korean sauce. But when it comes to like a southern fried, there is the school that sort of rings the buttermilk out of the chicken tenders before adding it to the dredge, then to a batter, then back into a dredge. And there’s a school that doesn’t do anything. They just take it out of the buttermilk into the flour. And that same process. Both of those ways have pros and cons. I’m going to show you both. And what is good about one and good about the other. Control. That’s what I want to give you. Now, the dredge is going to be pretty basic. Go in about 2 cups of allpurpose flour roughly. You know, this is not a science like baking. 1 cup of cornstarch. We go in a couple tablespoons of baking powder. Kind of helps give it a lighter crust. The cornstarch gives it more crispiness. A big pinch of salt. We don’t want to go too crazy with salt. The goaru sauce we’re going to make has a lot of that like kind of umami soy. Then some garlic powder, some onion powder, and some white pepper. Get that mixed in. And then we’re going to make the batter. So, it’s going to go flour, batter back into the flour. So, we’re going to go two eggs, about a/2 cup of water, about 1/4 cup of vodka. Vodka evaporates quicker than water, so adding it into a batter helps it get a little crispy. Then, I’m going to take about a/2 cup of the dredge and we’ll start to whisk it. Now, one thing I want to do is usually you’re looking for like a certain consistency on the batter, right? But since we’re going to be taking that chicken that’s dredged in flour into it, we’re going to be continuously thickening the batter over the course of the dredging process. So, I want to make it slightly thinner than I normally would. Still thick enough to coat it, but thin enough to give it some leeway for some more flour to get in there over the course of the dredge. So, now I’ve got a nice variety here. I’m going to do a few both ways. So, I’m just going to sort of ring out the excess, get them on a paper towel. Now, what this is going to do is create a much more lighter, more delicate crust, but it’s not going to be like the most earthshatteringly crispy thing you’ve ever had. Just give them a quick dry on top. I still got some water over here in case the batter gets a little bit too thick from the chicken. But now we’ll do the second method, which is not ringing it out, taking it straight from the batter into the dredge. So, we’re going to go in, and since we haven’t dropped any in, you can sort of just hit it with some droplets. So now what we’re first just doing is dredging it, right? Then from there we go into the batter, out of the batter, back into the flour. And now sometimes you see people like grinding it, squeezing it. What I want to do is just just kind of like toss it roughly, right? I don’t want to squeeze it. When you squeeze it, you sort of like squeeze that coating off a little bit. And once that coating’s off, you can’t get it back off. So what I’m going to do is just gently toss it. kind of like poking at it with my fingers. And then what you get is this like craggly little bits. That liquid mixed with the flour creates these little chunks that adhere to the chicken. And you could tell that’s going to fry off beautifully. Now we can take our dried chicken, add that to the dredge. Now you notice already at the dredge stage, it gets a little thinner of a dredge. Dust them off into the batter. When you’re dropping the other ones into the batter, they’re a little bit more delicate. These you can kind of toss in, get them nicely coated into the flour. Same deal. Once I’ve got them all breaded, roll them over one more time. Line them up. Now, what we’re going to do is just let this chill. I want to let that breading almost dry up, fully absorb into the chicken. Next up, a few garnishes. Some green onions for color. Some sesame seed. Some maple syrup, of course. So, for this, I’m going to cut it on the bias down here. And on that angle, I’m just going to cut slices. Now, onto the gou jang glaze. Again, we’ve got our gou jang, fermented chili paste. 3 tablespoons of that. Of course, if you don’t like Korean chili spice, like this is kind of on the spicier side. Remember, you could always just make it plain. You could add hot honey on top. Whatever you want to do. Going to add 1/4 cup of maple syrup. Usually, it’s honey, but since we’re doing this, we’re going to do some maple syrup. 2 tbsps of soy sauce. 1 to 1 and 1/2 tbsps of rice vinegar, depending on how zippy you like it. 1 tbspoon sesame oil. Then 1 tbsp of brown sugar. And whisk that together. Balanced. It’s not like overwhelmingly salty from the soy sauce. It’s not overwhelmingly like hot. You got that pronounced gou jang flavor to it. The only other thing we’re going to do, we’re going to cook that down. Helps dissolve that sugar. And we’re going to cook it in some garlic. So what I’m going to do is cut them big chunks like that. Lay them flat and they’ll mince up once you smash them. Now, before we go and cook this, obviously, we need a waffle maker, right? This is the AllClad. It’s a foursection waffle maker, and it’s deep. That’s what I looked for. I didn’t want a shallow waffle. I want a thick, crispy, fluffy on the inside waffle. Set it up on a sheet tray like this, just so inevitably when the waffle mix shoots out the back, you’ve got a nice station to capture it. Then, I’ve got my maple syrup in a little container like this, so I can just pop this in the microwave, warm it up before serving. On this machine, we’re preheating that bad boy to seven, its highest setting. We want it max crispy. Now we can wrap it up. In a small pan over mediumigh heat, we’re going to add a little bit of oil. And then we’re going to toss in that garlic. We want to cook that garlic until it’s lightly browned and nicely fragrant. Once that garlic starts developing some nice color, then we’re going to go ahead and add in the glaze. Stir it around. Cook it for about 3 to 5 minutes until it’s nice and thick and glossy. And then we can just let it cool until it’s ready to use. So, we’re going to double fry this chicken. So, for the first fry, we want to heat that oil to around 340 to 350°. You could go a little bit higher knowing that once you add that chicken right out of the fridge, it’s going to drop that temperature of the oil. First up, we’re going to try the super craggly chicken. And as you can see, it developed these really pronounced clusters that have sort of attached to the chicken. We want to slowly drop those into the oil. And we’re going to cook them for about five six minutes until they’re crisp and lightly golden. Since we’re going to fry them a second time at a higher temperature, we want to avoid overcooking them now. Otherwise, they’ll get too dark after the second fry. Once they’re lightly golden, we’re going to pull them out of the oil, transfer them to a wire rack, and we’re sort of looking for the moisture remaining in the chicken to soften up that crispy exterior. And at first, we want to just do this in batches. Three, four at a time, no more. That’s going to ensure each chicken is perfectly cooked. So once you’ve fried all of that chicken once, now we’re going to jack the heat up to around 365 to 380 for the second fry. The second time around, we can go a little bit larger batches, but you still don’t want to go crazy. And once you add that chicken at this higher temperature, you’re going to see a lot of steam releasing from the pot. That is that excess moisture we allowed to sort of release before that second fry. The second fry should evaporate that and what should remain is extremely crispy chicken. Now you see that looks more like a, you know, traditional southern fried chicken tender. This one’s a lot more intense, right? It’s just like a force field. This one’s got a little bit of softness to it. Not that it’s not crunchy, but like, you know, it’s a more delicate crunch. This is a more intense crunch. If I want chicken tenders, I probably want the more delicate ones. If I want fried chicken with that gouang glaze, I probably want the crunchier version. So, now we’ve got our waffle mix. Waffle iron is hot. I’m going to take some avocado oil, some butter. You just need to grease it a little bit. And then this batter should make six big crispy waffles. So, we’re going to go ahead and put four on right now. One cup in each slot should do the trick. And close it up. Like I said, it’s going to start coming out the back, but we’re prepared for that. I probably put a little too much in. We’re going to let this sit here for about four to five minutes and then give it a check. Do not open it yet. Starting to smell an aroma change. I’m thinking we might be able to take a peek. What a beautiful sight. [Music] That’s crispy. crispy but light and fluffy inside. That’s a beautiful thing. We’re going to go with the super crunchy, which is still crunchy. Max three pieces per person. Pour in that gochi jen sauce. And then give them a toss until they’re nicely glazed in that sauce. One waffle, another waffle, one piece of chicken, then a little bit of our warm honey. Mixed up some of our green onions, our sesame seeds, and of course, powdered sugar. [Music] You see that cakeier sort of batter? That’s what this method gets you. See how this looks like a much more normal chicken? Much lighter batter around the inside. Still amazing. And then still crispy even after being sauced. Is it breakfast? Is it dinner? I don’t know. That’s why they invented brunch. But if you want to make this recipe is going to be linked down in the description. I also encourage you to join my cooking school over on Patreon. It’s interactive. We do live streams. I give you homework. I kick some butt over there. Links down there. That’s all that I have today. I’ll see you next time. Until then, take care of yourself and go feed yourself. [Music]